Testing Second Inventory
(The following is a comment that I posted on the Second Life Forum discussion about Second Inventory)
There was a discussion about Second Inventory a while ago on the SL Educators list. I got in touch with the developer at got a copy of the the program to test. I provided feedback to him about what features need to be added or enhanced and ideas about how to do it.
There have been a few useful comments here. It does in fact use LibSL to connect you to the main SL grid. The production version does not yet have the ability to connect to other grids, such as the teen grid or any OpenSim based grids, but that is supposed to be in development.
It does not have the ability restore yet.
When you run the program, it does connect you to the main grid, so you will be disconnected from the regular viewer if you are logged in when you connect. You can still IMs while you are in the Second Inventory program.
Currently, you can only download objects one at a time. There is not a good mechanism for either full, differential or incremental backups yet.
For the data that is downloaded, you can extract the images if you have copy permissions. If you do not have copy permissions, you cannot extract the image, and even the view of the image is marred to indicate you do not have copy permissions. Likewise, you can extract tract the text of note cards and scripts.
It is now up to version 1.0.0.1 and there is plenty of development to do. However, to reject it out of hand as a fancy copybot is unreasonable and uninformed.
Why would you want it? If you've ever lost inventory in Second Life, and think that just copying to yet another location in Second Life isn't sufficient, this is a good tool. When and if it gets the ability to upload to alternative grids and when and if it gets better tools for categorizing objects that have been downloaded, it will be an important tool that any developer who has a large number of object and/or develops for multiple grids.